Don Kuiken

Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories☆

The notion that stylistic features of literary texts deautomatize perception is central to a tradition of literary theory from Coleridge through Shklovsky and Mukaiovslj to Van Peer. Stylistic variations, known as foregrounding, hypothetically prompt defamiliarization, evoke feelings, and prolong reading time. These possibilities were tested in four studies in which segment by segment reading times and ratings were collected from readers of a short story. In each study, foregrounded segments of the story were associated with increased reading times, greater strikingness ratings, and greater affect ratings. Response to foregrounding appeared to be independent of literary competence or experience. Reasons for considering readers’ response to foregrounding as a distinctive aspect of interaction with literary texts are discussed.

The role of absorption in experiential involvement.

The authors examined correlates of trait absorption to understand when and how pronounced engagement with attentional objects occurs. In Study 1 (N = 321), absorption and openness to experience were positively correlated (r =.64), and these involvement constructs were differentiated from Eysencks Big 3 (Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism; H. J. Eysenck & M. W. Eysenck, 1985). In Study 2 (N = 68), absorption was positively correlated with participation in the arts, with effects of art on mood, and with ratings of the importance of art to daily life (ps <.05). Absorption was negatively correlated with speed and positively correlated with productivity ofvisual figure-ground differentiation and was positively correlated with cross-modal elaborative processing (ps <.05). Trait absorption reflects (a) a motivational readiness to engage in experiential, noninstrumental functioning and (b) distinctive cognitive capacities to efficiently identify and richly elaborate objects of attention.

A feeling for fiction: becoming what we behold

Feelings during literaryreading can be characterized at four levels. First, feelings such as enjoyment, pleasure, or the satisfaction of reading are reactions to an already interpreted text [Spiel 9 (1990) 277]. While providing an incentive to sustain reading, these feelings playno significant role in the distinctivelyliteraryaspects of text interpretation. Second, feelings such as empathyor sy mpathywith an author, narrator, or narrative figure are involved in the interpretive processes bywhich a representation of the fictional world is developed and engaged [Poetics 23 (1994) 125]. Although serving an important mimetic role within text comprehension, these feelings, too, do not derive from the distinctivelyliteraryaspects of reading. Third, feelings of fascination, interest, or intrigue are an initial moment in readers’ response to the formal components of literarytexts (narrative, stylistic, or generic). Although serving to capture and hold readers’ attention [Poetics 22 (1994) 389], these aesthetic reactions onlyanticipate a fourth level of feeling that is the main focus of the present discussion: the modifying powers of feeling. We propose that aesthetic and narrative feelings interact to produce metaphors of personal identification that modifyself-understanding. We also argue that the concept of catharsis (the conflict of tragic feelings identified byAristotle) identifies one particular form of a more general pattern in which aesthetic and narrative feelings evoked during reading interact to modifythe reader. We illustrate these interactions with examples

Immediate and delayed incorporations of events into dreams: further replication and implications for dream function

The incorporation of memories into dreams is characterized by two types of temporal effects: the day‐residue effect, involving immediate incorporations of events from the preceding day, and the dream‐lag effect, involving incorporations delayed by about a week. This study was designed to replicate these two effects while controlling several prior methodological problems and to provide preliminary information about potential functions of delayed event incorporations. Introductory Psychology students were asked to recall dreams at home for 1 week. Subsequently, they were instructed to select a single dream and to retrieve past events related to it that arose from one of seven randomly determined days prior to the dream (days 1–7). They then rated both their confidence in recall of events and the extent of correspondence between events and dreams. Judges evaluated qualities of the reported events using scales derived from theories about the function of delayed incorporations. Average ratings of correspondences between dreams and events were high for predream days 1 and 2, low for days 3 and 4 and high again for days 5–7, but only for participants who rated their confidence in recall of events as high and only for females. Delayed incorporations were more likely than immediate incorporations to refer to events characterized by interpersonal interactions, spatial locations, resolved problems and positive emotions. The findings are consistent with the possibility that processes with circaseptan (about 7 days) morphology underlie dream incorporation and that these processes subserve the functions of socio‐emotional adaptation and memory consolidation.

Beyond text theory: Understanding literary response

Approaches to text comprehension that focus on propositional, inferential, and elaborative processes have often been considered capable of extension in principle to literary texts, such as stories or poems. However, we argue that literary response is influenced by stylistic features that result in defamiliarization; that defamiliarization invokes feeling which calls on personal perspectives and meanings; and that these aspects of literary response are not addressed by current text theories. The main differences between text theories and defamiliarization theory are discussed. We offer a historical perspective on the theory of defamiliarization from Coleridge to the present day, and mention some empirical studies that tend to support it.

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing Facilitates Attentional Orienting

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is a controversial treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that requires clients to make rapid eye movements while revisualizing a traumatic event. Although seemingly effective, the process by which EMDR exerts its effects is poorly understood. We propose that EMDRs eye movements facilitate the orienting response, i.e., the attentional adjustment to unexpected stimuli. Since the orienting response has been implicated in spontaneous transformations of dream content during REM sleep, we reasoned that, similarly, activation of the orienting response during EMDR may facilitate content transformations in traumatic memories. To examine this hypothesis, 25 undergraduates completed 20 seconds of eye movements or 20 seconds of visual fixation before each of two tasks: 1) a covert visual attention task, in which a cue indicated the likely position of a subsequent target, and 2) a sentence rating task, in which sentences with either metaphoric or non-metaphoric endings were rated for strikingness. Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that the eye movement manipulation facilitated attentional adjustments to targets presented in invalidly cued locations and increased the extent to which metaphoric sentence endings were found striking. Together these results suggest that the eye movements in EMDR induce attentional and semantic flexibility, thereby facilitating transformations in the clients narrative representation of the traumatic event. The implications of these findings for theories of dream formation and metaphor comprehension are also considered.

What is literariness? Three components of literary reading

It is now widely maintained that the concept of literariness has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent postmodern literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive psychology has often subsumed literary understanding within a general theory of discourse processing. However, a review of empirical studies of literary readers reveals traces of literariness that appear irreducible to either of these explanatory frameworks. Our analysis of readers’ responses to several literary texts (short stories and poems) indicates processes beyond the explanatory reach of current situation models. Such findings suggest a three‐component model of literariness involving foregrounded stylistic or narrative features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings.

Locating Self-Modifying Feelings Within Literary Reading

Self-modifying feelings during literary reading were studied in relation to the personality trait, absorption. Participants read a short story, described their experience of 3 striking or evocative passages in the story, and completed the Tellegen Absorption Scale (Tellegen, 1982). Compared to readers with either low or moderate absorption scores, those high in absorption were more likely to report affective theme variations and self-perceptual shifts, especially during an emotionally complicated portion of the story. Further analyses indicated that, rather than emotional involvement per se, the relationship between absorption and self-perceptual shifts was mediated by the interaction between theme variations and a style of expressive reflection called metaphors of personal identification.

Drinking to enhance and to cope: A daily process study of motive specificity

OBJECTIVE Daily process studies of internal drinking motives have not examined motive specificity, i.e., whether theoretically plausible trait and situational antecedents differ in their ability to predict the extent to which alcohol consumption on any given day is motivated by coping or enhancement. METHOD University students (N=81) completed trait measures of coping and enhancement-motivated drinking (trait CM and EM), sensation seeking, and conscientiousness, and then completed a 14-day online diary assessing daily completion of tasks, daily alcohol use, and (on days when alcohol was consumed) the extent to which drinking was motivated by coping or enhancement (daily CM and EM). RESULTS Hierarchical linear models revealed unique situational and trait antecedents of daily CM and EM. In the daily EM drinking model, main effects of daily positive affect (b=0.11, p<0.05), trait EM (b=2.88, p<0.01), and trait sensation seeking (b=0.36, p<0.01) were qualified by cross-level interactions between daily task accomplishment and trait conscientiousness (b=0.03, p<0.01), and daily task accomplishment and trait sensation seeking (b=0.03, p<0.01). In the daily CM drinking model, main effects of daily positive affect (b=-0.08, p<0.05), daily negative affect (b=0.13, p<0.05), and trait CM (b=4.40, p<0.01), were qualified by cross-level interactions between trait CM and daily positive affect (b=-0.12, p<0.05), trait CM and daily negative affect (b=0.18, p<0.01), and trait conscientiousness and daily task accomplishment (b=0.01, p<0.01). CONCLUSION Our results replicated and extended Cooper et al.s (1995) findings on the differential roles of sensation seeking and negative affect in CM and EM drinking at the daily level, and call into question the view that drinking motives should be solely conceptualized as individual difference variables. Theoretical and applied implications of the findings are discussed.

Nonimmediate language style and inconsistency between private and expressed evaluations

Abstract It was hypothesized that certain language style variations would reflect apprehension about affirming the validity of communication content. Wiener and Mehrabian (Language within language: Immediacy, a channel in verbal communication. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,1968) have identified a cluster of such variations called verbal nonimmediacy, which they describe as indicators of psychological distance between the communicator and his/her communication. Four experiments are reported. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that communication about positive manifestations of disliked traits and negative manifestations of liked traits was more nonimmediate than when positive manifestations of liked traits or negative manifestations of disliked traits were described. This was true both when ones own or anothers personality traits were described. In Experiment 3, nonimmediacy was found to increase when communications involved clear fabrications about either ones liked or disliked traits. Experiment 4 showed that when self-regard was experimentally manipulated, low self-regard subjects showed more opinion conformity and nonimmediacy in their disclosures to a confederate than did high self-regard subjects.